A Legend Returns

Ruth J. Simmons was enjoying her time as a sophomore at Dillard University, in New Orleans, in 1965 when she got an unsettling message.

“One Saturday morning, I received a note that the president wanted to see me at his house,” she says.

Uh oh. Simmons thought her extracurricular life had caught up with her.

“I was a well-known rabble-rouser at that age,” she says, laughing. She refused chapel attendance—even though it was mandatory for all students—insisting that the requirement disrespected the individual faiths of members of the community. She spent a lot of time advocating for changes that she thought would make Dillard live up to its reputation as one of the best historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the country. And now she was being summoned by Dillard’s frosty president, Albert W. Dent. That couldn’t be good.

“I thought, ‘Well, this is it; I’m going to be sent home.’”

But that wasn’t the reason for the command audience. Dent wanted the young rebel to take part in a unique experiment: The university had been invited to send one of its best and brightest female students to Wellesley, to spend her junior year on campus in what the College was calling its Guest Junior program.

Dillard’s president was suggesting that Simmons represent the university.

“It wasn’t a suggestion at all,” Simmons notes. It was a unique opportunity, and Dent wanted Dillard to be a part of it. Basically, he was telling her: Go, work hard, make us proud—and don’t mess up.

So, despite some misgivings, Simmons prepared to go. “The idea of going all the way up north to this place was terrifying,” she recalls. “But I did it because I had to do it.”

Simmons’s experience at Wellesley helped shape the trajectory of her distinguished career, which has included becoming the first Black president of Smith College; the first Black president of an Ivy League school, when she took on that role at Brown University; and the first female president of Prairie View A&M University. A giant in her field, Simmons is a voice for the transformative power of higher education. She also calls on institutions to live up to their foundational ideals, which has earned her the affectionate nickname “Ruth the Truth.” In May, she returned to Wellesley for the first time in over 60 years, to deliver the commencement address to the class of 2026.

Ruth Jean Stubblefield (Simmons is her married name; she and her husband divorced in 1989) was the youngest of 12 children in a sharecropping family in the East Texas hamlet of Daly. She’d gotten to Dillard because a teacher who was an alumna wrote to her alma mater, told them about her bright student, and urged them to admit her and pay for her education. Dillard did, and Ruth Jean thought maybe she owed them something.

In a press release that announced Wellesley’s program, President Margaret Clapp ’30 said the Catherine Hughes Waddell Guest Juniors had been selected by the students’ southern HBCUs and the United Negro College Fund. Clapp said Waddell, class of 1920, “was vitally concerned with the advancement of educational opportunities for Negroes” and had for decades worked with several organizations to push for higher education for Negro students. As far back as the late 1880s, Wellesley had had Negro students—the parlance of the time, through the 1960s—but they were a sparse presence. The year Simmons arrived, there were seven four-year students in the entire school.

“I landed there unprepared, with no clothes for the winter,” Simmons remembers. Before school started, she and the other Guest Juniors (in her year, there were 10) each stayed with a host family in town; hers helped her choose a proper coat, which she purchased with funds one of her older brothers had sent.

Her Wellesley home was Stone Hall. She was assigned a coveted single and settled in to make friends with her hallmates. She didn’t get to spend much time with the other Guest Juniors. Looking back, she thinks that was purposeful.

“I must say, there was not much of an effort to get us together. I think they wanted us to make sure that we fully absorbed Wellesley life,” she muses, “and so they left us in our areas to get to know the students in our halls, and so on.”

Which she did. She took trips into Boston, and she traveled with her dormmates on family visits. There was a lot of interaction with Wellesley students. But there were no regular meet-ups with the other Guest Juniors as a group. At the time, “I didn’t think it odd, particularly, that we were separated in the way that we were,” Simmons says. “I only came to think about how odd it was afterward.” And then when she thought about it, “I did feel that we were there to give Wellesley students a sampling of what it was like to have Black students, and that [the Guest Junior program] was very symbolic, and not meant to be so meaningful.”

In fact, the program was intended to last for three years only. The hope, President Clapp said in a 1964 statement, was that as word spread, more bright young Negro women would apply and be accepted, and the College “would have not nine or ten able and earnest guests, but nine or ten well-prepared, able, and earnest Negro students in each entering class.”

“Imagine stepping into a place where you can think of yourself as worthy, or you can think of yourself as having ideas that you can express, where you can think of yourself as having ambition.”

—Ruth J. Simmons

Simmons’s official relationship with the College ended with her completion of the program. There was no contact between the College and its Guest Juniors after they left. “You know, if you go someplace for even one course or a semester today you get alumni news about what’s happening at the college,” she says. But not from Wellesley. “Absolute silence. And so I always felt, given the way we were treated, that there wasn’t really an intent to have us be a real part of the College. We were an embellishment.”

Despite that, Simmons took a lot away from the experiment, too. Spending time in an institution where women took leadership roles was eye-opening. At home and at Dillard, she was expected to defer to the men, whether it was by serving her brothers and father, who customarily ate before her mother and sisters, or letting her male classmates answer first in school. She grew up assuming girls were not as smart as boys. And that whites were innately superior.

“One of the great drawbacks of being in a segregated environment is you really don’t know how you measure up in the world,” Simmons notes. “You know how you measure up in your own environment. And I had no idea whether I could or could not do the things that I saw Wellesley students doing, because I’d been in this very closed environment all my life. So the first test for me was: Did I have the capacity to excel academically in a rigorous environment that I did not know and could not have known before I went to Wellesley?”

That “closed environment”—a completely segregated world, first in East Texas, then in New Orleans, “urged me to think less of myself, to have no ambition, to stand back and never assert my views.” At Wellesley, Simmons says, things were different.

“Imagine stepping into a place where you can think of yourself as worthy, or you can think of yourself as having ideas that you can express, where you can think of yourself as having ambition,” she says.

But first she had to finish her time at Wellesley, and that required getting through French. She’d taken the language at Dillard and done well, but the process was different at Wellesley. It was a shock to Simmons to discover that French classes were taught entirely in French. “I was utterly lost in that class,” she sighs. She decided she should drop it. But she had a problem: Her French teacher said “Non.” Nor would he sign the permission slip required by the registrar to drop the class.

“And I said, ‘Well, what shall I do if I’m so lost in this course?’”

His advice: “Work harder.”

So Simmons studied relentlessly and practically lived in the language lab. “And then, one day, miraculously, I had this epiphany: I was sitting in class and found myself understanding.” Et voilà!

Simmons would go on to receive a Fulbright award to study at the Université de Lyon in France, and then earn a master’s and a doctorate in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard. She wrote extensively on French-speaking authors and poets in addition to serving as a French professor before becoming an administrator. In 2025, she was named an officer in the French National Order of the Legion of Honor, one of the highest decorations bestowed by the French government.

“I’m immensely grateful to this man that I thought so unsympathetic,” Simmons says. “He told me that this is hard stuff, and in order to do it, you just have to work harder at it. So I worked harder at it and proved to myself that I could do things that I didn’t think I could ever do. And this is the mantra that I’ve used across my career with my students. It’s something I learned from the challenge I received from this faculty member at Wellesley.”

She also learned to respect differences of opinion and viewpoints—even those with which she disagreed—and even to recognize bias in herself. “That meant all the world to me. I never forgot it. I thought it was one of the most important learning experiences in my life,” she says.

Born into segregation and poverty, Ruth Simmons could have had a very narrow life. But thanks in part to her Guest Junior year, when she left Wellesley, she says, “I was in a different place entirely from what I thought about my future. And that was the greatest gift by far.”